GUILDERLAND — With steadily-anticipated growth over the next decade, one Westmere church is looking to move its congregation to more expansive environs just three miles up on the road from its present location.

On Wednesday, the Guilderland Planning Board heard from Sharon Fellowship Church, located on a half-acre at 1779 Western Ave., about its proposal to purchase and renovate parts of the over 40-acre Dutch Manor Stable property at 2331 Western Ave., which is currently listed for sale at $899,900.

“We are a very [small] subset of [the] Pentecostal Church,” Santhosh Tharian, the church’s senior pastor, told planning board members, “speaking [a] very specific dialect.”

Founded in India in the 1950s, Sharon Fellowship established its Capital Region roots in 2009. It’s the first Malayali Pentecostal, a form of evangelical Protestantism, church in the area. 

The Malayali are a group of people from the southwest coast of India who share both a common language and heritage. The language is spoken by at least 35 million of India’s 1.38 billion people. A recent Carnegie Endowment survey found Malayalam to be the native tongue of 6 percent of the over four million  Indian-origin residents in the United States 

At last count, a decade ago, there were 279 million Pentecostals worldwide; in the United States, about 11 percent of the country’s 160 million Protestants were of the Pentecostal denomination, according to Pew Research. The denomination has grown since then, being heralded as the “fastest growing religious movement on earth.” Guilderland’s planning board members were told on Wednesday the Sharon Fellowship Church anticipated its current congregation of 35 families would expand to between 80 and 100 within a decade.  

To prepare for the growth, the existing 120-by 200-foot stable and riding arena at Dutch Manor Stable would be repurposed to house the church offices, a kitchen, and bathrooms, in addition to being the host site of weekly Bible studies.

The board was told the church wanted to phase in its parking plan, with 50 being proposed right away and another 100 spots banked for future expansion. 

With the East and West branches of the Hunger Kill running along two sides of the parcel, board members thought there could be an issue with parts of the property being located in state-designated wetlands.

But Chairman Stephen Feeney said, “This is probably a good use for the site, as opposed to some other uses that could go in and generate more routine traffic.” He added later in the meeting, “We’ve had other people come in and want to do large developments and stuff on the site, I just don’t think [it] lends itself to that.”